Mary Hallan-FioRito, who sits on Aid for Women’s Board of Directors, suggested during her speech in Chicago, “Let’s take that $500 million [public funds awarded to Planned Parenthood] and put it where American women really want it to go: safer neighborhoods, better housing, and better education for their children.”

Operatives from the sham company Center for Medical Progress, set up under questionable circumstances specifically to attack Planned Parenthood, appear to have used alcohol as a means toward getting providers to talk more freely.

The move is a welcome step toward protecting women in the states in which clinics of criminal abortion provider Steven Brigham have operated, but the question remains as to why it took regulators so long to act.

South Carolina state Sen. Lee Bright, an ardent anti-choice Republican, filibustered a bill Thursday to ban abortion 20 weeks post-fertilization. The measure, he said, is too lenient because it included exceptions for rape, incest, and fetal anomaly.

At a time when the nation is facing numerous crises, including crumbling and increasingly dangerous infrastructure, the GOP leadership in Congress is deregulating and defunding services and agencies that save people’s lives, while obsessing about abortion bans. And for this they are called “pro-life.”

With his announcement that he would sign a 20-week abortion ban should one reach his desk, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker joins a slate of fervently anti-choice Republican presidential candidates who support a flatly unconstitutional law.